International bestselling author Jeffrey Archer returns with a triumphant historical novel, Paths of Glory. Paths of Glory, is the story of such a man—George Mallory. Born in 1886, he was a brilliant student who became part of the Bloomsbury Group at Cambridge in the early twentieth century and served in the Royal Garrison Artillery during World War I. After the war, he married, had three children, and would have spent the rest of his life as a schoolteacher, but for his love of mountain climbing. Mallory once told a reporter that he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, "because it is there." On his third try in 1924, at age thirty-seven, he was last seen four hundred feet from the top. His body was found in 1999, and it remains a mystery whether he and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, ever reached the summit. In fact, not until you've turned the last page of Archer's extraordinary novel will you be able to decide if George Mallory should be added to that list of legends, while another name would have to be removed.
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"I have been a fan of Jeffrey Archer since reading Kane and Abel many years ago. I just finished his novel, Paths of Glory, the story of the 1924 "failed" attempt to climb Mt. Everest by George Mallory. Though I am not typically a fan of man against nature themes along the lines of Jon Krakauer, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. First of all, it is not exactly a classic example of Archer's work. The plot is less sophisticated, the character's humbler, the writing simpler, resulting in a much less exhausting but extremely satisfying reading experience. The characters are engaging, not just Mallory, but also his friend/rival George Finch and his other English climbing contemporaries. The only character left wanting is Mallory's too perfect, completely selfless wife who seems not to even struggle terribly hard with what she and Mallory jokingly call his "affair with the other woman, Chomolungma" the Tibetan name for Mt. Everest meaning Goddess Mother of the World. Being a wife and a mother, I was unable to find her overly supportive role believable. Archer should have thrown in a little more anger and fear from a woman, wife and mother who repeatedly risked losing her husband and her helpmate. I did appreciate the irony that one of Mallory's daughters relived her mother's fate and was left to raise three small children alone after she too lost her husband to a passion for climbing. In fact, the ending of the book would have been lacking had Archer NOT included the short paragraphs about the fates of those who did not die on Mt. Everest. After all, as Archer reminds us via Thomas Gray's poem in the beginning, even "the paths of glory lead but to the grave.""
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Ruth (4 out of 5 stars)